EPILEPSY AS A PSYCHO-SOCIAL DISEASE: “HOW DO YOU HELP TEENAGERS COPE?” ‘IS THERE MUCH DIFFERENCE BETWEEN COUNSELING TEENAGERS AND COUNSELING ADULTS WITH EPILEPSY?”

admin — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:15:23 +0000

“I work mostly with children and teens, so I’m more likely to talk about them, but I counsel adults as well. Every person is an individual. Some are more mature than others. Sure, teens have their own hang-ups and you need to help them achieve independence and get over the hump from child to adult. While there are many similarities in counseling adults, it is sometimes more difficult, especially if they’ve had seizures since childhood. Too frequently, adequate counseling and education were not available to them. They’ve spent so many years with a poor self-image; reconstructing is more difficult than building it right in the first place. They need to learn how to take control of their epilepsy and also of their lives. That’s one of the reasons why I feel so strongly that children need to take ownership of their seizures at the earliest possible point.”

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WHAT IS EPILEPSY? THE EVENTS LEADING TO A SEIZURE

admin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:26:00 +0000

One of the ways in which events can go wrong is when a nerve cell loses some of its inputs from other cells because of damage to these other nerve cells. If inhibitory terminals are lost, then the cell will become over-excitable, and begin to switch on, or fire inappropriately, driving other nerve cells with which it is connected on the downstream side to similar activity. This may result in more and more nerve cells being incorporated into the abnormal pattern of discharge.

The biological background of an epileptic seizure is therefore an abnormal discharge of nerve cells in the cerebral hemispheres of the brain. The normal, quiet, and integrated function of nerve cells is interrupted as they are forced through the contacts they make with and receive from others into a paroxysmal discharge. Different types of seizure are a reflection of different patterns of paroxysmal discharge. If the seizure discharge spreads throughout large areas of the brain, then consciousness may be lost. If the discharge of nerve cells is confined to the temporal lobe of the brain (more or less above and in front of the ears), amongst those cells concerned with memory, the paroxysmal discharge may result only in a distortion of memory so that the sufferer perceives that he or she has experienced ongoing events before—the phenomenon of deja vu.

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The blog is about health and gives useful information on health and disease. » Epilepsy

EPILEPSY AS A PSYCHO-SOCIAL DISEASE: “HOW DO YOU HELP TEENAGERS COPE?” ‘IS THERE MUCH DIFFERENCE BETWEEN COUNSELING TEENAGERS AND COUNSELING ADULTS WITH EPILEPSY?”

WHAT IS EPILEPSY? THE EVENTS LEADING TO A SEIZURE